1. Field
The embodiments discussed herein are directed to a data transmission/reception apparatus for inserting maintenance management data into data to be transmitted, transmitting the data to be transmitted, and extracting the maintenance management data from received data, and to a method for inserting and extracting the maintenance management data.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a data transmission/reception apparatus of a computer network (hereinafter referred to as a network) using a standard such as Ethernet or the like, there has been conventionally adopted a method which maintains and manages the computer communication line by using maintenance management data to be added to communication data. Since the data transmission/reception apparatus on a reception side can extract the maintenance management data from the communication data, and detect a network failure such as a link failure based on the maintenance management data, it becomes possible deal with the failure.
Technologies using Ethernet technology have been increasingly applied to a WAN (Wide Area Network) as physical layer devices have become capable of a longer-distance communication, and the transmission and exchange of maintenance management information have been increasingly important, for example, as in the case with a SONET/SDH (Synchronous Optical NETwork/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) line.
An example of the maintenance management data in Ethernet is an Ether-OAM (Operation Administration and Maintenance) frame represented by IEEE Standard 802.3ah that is normalized. The Ether-OAM frame may be inserted into the same transmission path as that for user data, and may be extracted from the same transmission path. The Ether-OAM frame is a frame in the same network layer as a user Ethernet frame, and is inserted and extracted in a network layer 2.
Conventionally, a maintenance management system and a maintenance management method is disclosed in which the network can be maintained and managed without affecting a communication traffic by inserting the maintenance management data in a guard time between communication frames in a data link layer (network layer 2) and higher in a 7 Layer model for OSI ((Open Systems Interconnection), also referred to as the OSI reference model) and performing communication.